Optimizing Soil Stabilization with Chitosan: Investigating Acid Concentration, Temperature, and Long-Term Strength.

Civil and geotechnical researchers are searching for economical alternatives to replace traditional soil stabilizers such as cement, which have negative impacts on the environment. Chitosan biopolymer has shown its capacity to efficiently minimize soil erosion, reduce hydraulic conductivity, and adsorb heavy metals in soil that is contaminated. This research used unconfined compression strength (UCS) to investigate the impact of chitosan content, long-term strength assessment, acid concentration, and temperature on the improvement of soil strength.

Putting seedlings on the map: Trade-offs in demographic rates between ontogenetic size classes in five tropical forests.

All species must partition resources among the processes that underly growth, survival, and reproduction. The resulting demographic trade-offs constrain the range of viable life-history strategies and are hypothesized to promote local coexistence. Tropical forests pose ideal systems to study demographic trade-offs as they have a high diversity of coexisting tree species whose life-history strategies tend to align along two orthogonal axes of variation: a growth-survival trade-off that separates species with fast growth from species with high survival and a stature-recruitment trade-off that separates species that achieve large stature from species with high recruitment.

Correlation Between Handgrip Strength and Bone Density and Fragility Fracture Risk Among Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: Population aging has led to a surge in elderly care needs worldwide. Bone aging, skeletal muscle degeneration, and osteoporosis pose critical health challenges for the elderly. The process of bone and skeletal muscle aging not only impacts the functional abilities but also increases fragility fracture risk.

Deep learning-based free-water correction for single-shell diffusion MRI.

Free-water elimination (FWE) modeling in diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is crucial for accurate estimation of diffusion properties by mitigating the partial volume effects caused by free water, particularly at the interface between white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. The presence of free water partial volume effects leads to biases in estimating diffusion properties. Additionally, the existing mathematical FWE model is a two-compartment model, which can be well posed for multi-shell data.